


Love and Exile

by iberiandoctor (jehane)



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Apocalypse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magda Survives, Canon Disabled Character, Chocolate Box Treat, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post X-Men: First Class, Pre-X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Threesome - F/M/M, X-Men: Apocalypse (2016, X-Men: Apocalypse Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-22 10:30:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9604088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: Erik needn't have worried. Charles was always going to love her; they just needed to see if she'd decide to love him back.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts).



> Thank you to Trobadora for the beta!

Without the helmet, Erik's thoughts are as bright as day: _What if he doesn't love her?_

It isn't, _What if he doesn't love me_. Erik has many fears -- that the men whom they evaded in the woods will come after them; that anti-mutant forces will follow Henryk Gurzsky across the ocean; that they'll capture his wife and their daughter and he won't be able to protect them, the same way he failed to protect his mother and so many of their kind -- but losing Charles' love isn't one of them. 

They both know that Charles has never stopped loving Erik, despite the intervening years and the battle lines they've drawn between them. Erik left Charles broken on a beach in Cuba, and stayed away for fifteen years, and even then he has never left Charles' thoughts.

It seems Magda knows it, too. Erik told her, on the same day he told her he was a mutant. He told her the first person he'd ever had sex with had been a man; told her, too, how he felt about that man, and how he would always feel until the day he died. She hadn't left after she'd heard it; despite everything, she'd stayed, and it seems that was the day Erik fell in love with her as well.

Charles is aware that Erik hadn't planned on returning to him. Too many differences that couldn't be bridged, too many hurts for which Erik believed he could never be forgiven.

But when his family was mortally threatened, there was only one person Erik could trust. 

_I wouldn't be here if there was any other way,_ Erik sent, the morning he showed up on Charles' doorstep. He wasn't wearing his helmet. He introduced his wife and child, and then collapsed across Charles' chair. 

Embracing his friend, Charles gazed up at the slender woman who had travelled at Erik's side. She was every bit as exhausted as her husband, but somehow she still held herself upright, chin lifted proudly, ready to defend their daughter with her last breath.

 _I love them more than life. If anything happened to them..._ Erik sent, later, quite superfluously; that love rang in his thoughts, as clear as exactly nothing else in Erik's life had ever been, which included Erik's own love for him. 

Erik needn't have worried. 

  
  
  
  


It doesn't start off that way, but afterwards it's easy, easier than air: as easy as falling for Erik had been when they were little more than boys together, easy as the first foolish dreams of their future when they believed nothing could part them. 

Nina is an unqualified treasure. She's fierce like her mother and as passionate as her father used to be, and she charms squirrels from the trees and foxes and racoons from the forest and eagles from the sky. Clouds of butterflies surround her by day, and at night bats roost outside her new room. Teenagers don't usually make time for little girls, but Scott and Jean and the others take to this one singular soul. She is Magda's sun, she is Erik's night and day, and it's astoundingly easy for Charles to love her, too. 

But Magda is a different proposition entirely. Her quicksilver mind is difficult to get a reading on, like a constantly-shifting barrier. She has no reason to trust him, or believe that his school and his people could provide any sort of haven for her family.

Still, she trusts Erik, loves him enough to leave her country and all the life she's known, and she hasn't raised a murmur of protest, at least not in Charles' hearing.

And Erik trusts her, relies on her, with an unquestioning ease that's so uncharacteristic in this deeply mistrustful man, that Charles is almost surprised he isn't more jealous of their bond.

  
  
  
  


In the Lensherrs' first week at Graymalkin Lane, Charles left them to their own devices, so they could catch their breath and take stock of what they had left behind. 

Of course, left to his own devices, Erik would have stayed in their assigned room, paralysed by old guilt and his array of new fears. 

It's how Charles knows, the night Erik appears at his bedroom door, that this is Magda's idea.

"Is Nina already asleep?" Charles asks casually.

Erik nods. "Magda's settling her in," he says, and pauses. He's wearing old pajamas and a robe borrowed from Hank. Framed in the doorway, thick hair starting to showing silver in the low light, he is even more desirable than he was fifteen years ago. 

In his chair and with his body's limitations, Charles doesn't feel particularly desirable himself, but when Erik crosses the room and takes him into his arms, Charles is left in no doubt that Erik wants him as badly as he always has. 

_Always have, always will,_ Erik sends, kissing Charles' mouth, his sensitive nipples, the insides of his thighs which can still feel lingering sparks of sensation. _It's always been you, Charles. I was an idiot to have left. I'm more sorry than I can say._

 _You're here now,_ Charles sends back, and kisses his tears away. 

Charles doesn't always get hard in bed even at the best of times, but on this night and for this man, his body remembers what it's like to be young again. 

He rouses slowly but surely under Erik's hands, and Erik buries himself on top of him, and after that everything is as fast as it used to be, with Erik as quickly overwhelmed, cursing and crying out and coming without a hand to his prick. Then Charles is coming too, in a helpless wave of pleasure that seizes hold of Erik and spills over and outwards, making Jean and the other telepaths in the house twitch restlessly in their dreams, and catching Magda, silent and waiting, in its ebb.

"Oh dear," Charles says after they both subside, panting, into the wreck of their sheets, but he can't muster up much embarrassment with Erik murmuring post-coital German endearments in his ear. 

In fact, he can't muster up much of anything apart from weary satiation, and what ought to be a deeply embarrassing fondness for his former arch-enemy and his oldest love.

Erik cleans them up, and then settles back in beside him, wrapping Charles in a protective clasp that's almost painful: as if he means to shield Charles from the world or die trying. He sends, _This time we'll make it work, I promise._

Charles isn't sure that's a promise Erik can keep, but it sounds like Erik is truly willing to die trying, and that's good enough for him. 

  
  
  
  


It's morning before Charles thinks to ask after Magda, cursing himself for a besotted fool.

Erik grins. His lower lip is still red and swollen from their second round of reunion sex, and there's a lightness to him that wasn't there the day before. 

"She asked me to stay here with you," he confesses, and Charles realises Magda knows her husband even better than he knows himself.

  
  
  
  


Magda starts coming to him when Erik and Nina go on their forest rambles; she pushes his wheelchair through the gardens and lets him point out the shrubs and greenery that aren't native to Poland. When Charles isn't teaching they watch television together, frowning at the international news and fascinated by daytime re-runs of _Star Trek_.

They trade books. He shares with her the T.H. White that Erik and he had read together in their youth, when they'd believed they could build a once and future kingdom for their people to live in peace. She brings him the English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's autobiographical _Lost in America_ , a story of a Polish émigré who had left his partner and child in search of another life in the New World. 

They trade stories, too: about her father and his mother, about the school, about the battle for mutant rights, and about Erik, always Erik. 

Charles knows she's trying to see if she can trust him. He knows he needs to try as well.

He finds it doesn't take much effort on his part after all. It's easy, too, easy as air. She might be quicksilver and suspicious, but she loves Erik. She gave him the child whom Erik strives every day to be worthy of. And she has taught Erik that humans could trust and be trusted, could love and be loved -- that humans could live peacefully with mutants as Charles had always dreamed they could. 

In this way, too, she has brought Erik back to him. He'll always love her for that.

  
  
  
  


The afternoon she sets aside _The Once and Future King_ and crosses the room, Charles doesn't need telepathy to know she's made her decision.

"Are you and Erik aware this book is about a triad?"

"We never saw it that way," Charles begins, but of course she's right. Arthur might have staved off the fall of his kingdom if he'd married Lance as well as Guinevere and taken them both to his bed. Neither he nor Erik had thought about it before, but there was definitely both love and desire there, in equal measure, between the king and queen and their gallant knight. 

Magda climbs into his lap and presses her lips against his, and Charles cups her face in his hands. They take their time to acquaint themselves with each other's bodies as they have with each other's minds. It's been a while since Charles has been with a woman -- almost a year since Amelia left -- and the warm, soft weight of Magda in his arms takes his breath away.

 _Am I doing this right?_ she thinks at him in English, her careful mind-voice at odds with the eagerness curling through her body. 

She means her mental as well as physical overtures, of course. In response, Charles sends her a mental image of how overcome he is by her, and he grins when he hears her gasp of arousal against his lips and in his mind. 

_Good_ , she sends, barely forming the word, just a flare of sensation that rises from under her tongue and her fingertips and where her bottom is pressed against his thighs.

She isn't wearing a bra; he cups her breasts and palms her nipples through her blouse. She mimics his movements, and they both gasp again when she discovers how sensitive he is there. 

He sends her wordless echoes of what her touch is doing to him, and she sends them back with increasing familiarity and less and less coherence. He strokes her thighs and pushes her skirt up her hips; she parts her legs for him, and they breathe harshly together as he slides his hand into her panties.

 _Am I doing this right?_ he sends, deliberately, although he has a pretty good idea from the sounds she's making and the way she's moving against him and the cloud of heat rising from her mind and her sex. 

_Yes_ , she sends, _yes_ ; with her thoughts as well as her body, she shows him how she likes it best. Charles has always been adept at this, and it's not long before she's groaning his name and clenching wetly around his fingers.

 _Good_ , he sends, as she comes apart under his hands. 

Afterwards, they both send each other the same message: _Is it like this with Erik?_

They both burst into laughter, and it's at this point that Erik charges into the room.

He stops short at the sight of his wife and his lover, partially undressed and helpless with hilarity in each other's embrace.

"What's so funny? Damn it, when I said, what if you don't love her, and to you, please try, I, I didn't mean for this..."

He pulls up short, biting his lip; Charles feels the unmistakable jolt of his desire. Flushing a dark red, he murmurs, "...I suppose this _is_ actually what I meant, isn't it?"

"You know it is, darling," Magda says. She holds her arms out to Erik without getting off Charles' lap.

 _Your Guinevere knows you better than you know yourself_ , Charles sends, slyly, to both of them.

He smiles at Erik's and Magda's surprise at hearing each other's thoughts. Perhaps this is a gift he can give them, that he can give all three of them.

Magda sends, teasingly, _Just so that you know, Charles, it is very different with Erik. He is better with his tongue than his fingers... and he hates it when I pull his hair._

 _You'll find out Charles doesn't much like hair-pulling, either_ , Erik snorts, lifting Magda into his arms. There's a day bed in the corner of Charles' office, ostensibly for cat-napping purposes; Charles is very pleased that he'd had the foresight to install a bed large enough to accommodate other purposes as well.

Erik secures the door with his talent as he carries Magda over to the bed, and then he comes back for Charles. Amused, Charles lets Erik pick him up. Erik's flushed and smiling, and rock-hard under his trousers, but there's an underlying hesitation buried so deep down only Charles knows it's there.

Easy as anything, easy as air.

 _Don't be afraid_ , Charles tells his old friend, his oldest love. _I already do. We just need to see if she decides to love_ me.

Erik has to sit down on the bed beside them; he buries his face in Charles' shoulder, and Magda's arms close around them both. Charles looks over Erik's shaking body and meets Magda's eyes: he knows she heard every word.

"I am working on it," she says out loud. He reaches for her hand, and she smiles like a promise, and, by God, it's a start.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's, Unforgotten! In the nature of romantic fix-its everywhere, Apocalypse considerately only comes knocking after the events of this story ;)
> 
> Title from Isaac Bachevis Singer's 1984 biography, about his spiritual journey from Poland to his life in America.


End file.
